This post was published long before the Mists of Pandara Expansion.
The tips and techniques explained here may be outdated.

Behold our MIGHT!

Bam! The patch is here.. we’re half Wrath-ified. and ZOMG! We are so OP.

Last night West Kingdom formed up for Gruul’s.. to test it out. We started out tentatively. The first brute died.. brutally. The second, someone pulled aggro.. and we still totally blasted him.

We smashed High King Maulgar and crew.. even though the mage tank died.

We killed Gruul at grow 5. FIVE!!! Seriously. Before the patch we were usually in the 12-16 range for grows.
Bad news:
– They’ve updated it so you can only carry one Healthstone. Even if you have 3 different sized soulwells in the raid, you can only carry one of the stones.

After the run I toddled off to Netherstorm and played with Dr. Boom. I killed him twice.

I totally get that I could have done the same thing with a test dummy.. but sometimes the old ways are best.

Observations:
– I miss my old configuration of Dottimer. *sigh* I think I’m going to have to tinker with the XML of Dottimer to fiddle the look around.
– I never drank, never used a mana potion, NEVER USED DRAIN LIFE and I still maintained nearly full health/mana throughout the ENTIRE fight. Ending at 100%/100%.**
– Even with not knowing what I’m doing, my average dps jumped from 750-1050.
– I used very few Shadow bolts. I didn’t have a “rotation” per se.. so much as “keep all the dots up”, “push buttons until I run out of buttons, then Shadow Bolt”. I kept up: Haunt, Corruption, Unstable Affliction, Siphon Life, Immolate and Curse of Agony. With all those buttons to push (and quick taps before Haunt came back to me) I had very little sluff time when I wasn’t putting up more dots.

** I did change my “life tap” to use a macro that uses “lifeblood” (little HoT for herbalists) and then “lifetap”. I’m constantly surrounded by flowers and healing a little bit.

There is a new build for Dotimer for 3.0.2 on curse. I found it last night while I was redoing the interface. So far it’s really nice, I highly recommend it. I would link it here but im at work and cannot get to curse right now. If you search for Dotimer (that spelling) you will find it.